Happy Hanukkah!

Before Winter break, we spent a lot of time learning about holidays around the world! 

We enjoyed visiting other classes and learning about different holidays.  We had our own "passports" and we traveled to Mexico, Germany, France, and China! 

Our class learned about Hanukkah!

We learned about different parts of Hanukkah like the menorah.  She learned about different foods that people eat during Hanukkah like latkes and gelt!  We also learned about the dreidel game!  We learned a song that went with the dreidel game and the sign language motions that go with it. 

We made pictures of the flag of Israel, a menorah, and the different sides of the dreidel to show to our friends.  We worked together to make these by tearing paper and gluing them into the design. 

 Then we got to present everything we learned to all the other classes! 

I am so proud!  The children did a wonderful job!  You can see for yourself...

Great job!!  We are now Hanukkah experts! 

Hope you had a great winter break!  We are excited to back at school and have decided to learn about SNOW for our next study!  Stay tuned...!

Silly Old Santa

This week have been busy working on our Holidays Around the World project! 

We are excited to share with you our project on Hannukah as soon as we finish it! 

We have been getting our room ready for Hannukah AND Christmas!  We each made a Silly Old Santa.  These are displayed at the end of our hallway.  The annual Senior Citizen's Luncheon is next week and we hope our decorations make them smile!

My favorite part of this project is that each person's Santa is unique.  No two are alike because the children are given paper and directions on what to make but they must decide HOW to make it themselves!  I love all the different personalities!

HO!  HO!  HO!

Run, Run! As Fast As You Can!

We have been doing a lot of work with the story of The Gingerbread Man!  The kids LOVE this story and have really gotten into reading all the different versions.

These are just some of the books we have read...

Can you believe how many different stories there are?

The Gingerbread Man is the perfect story for us to use when we are learning about story elements.  We have spent a lot of time talking about the difference characters in each story.  We done some comparing and contrasting as well!  We have also talked about the settings of each story and the plot and main idea!  These are all the concepts that the children will need to be able to identify on their own later in the year!

We also got into some Gingerbread Fun of our own!  We made Gingerbread Boy or Girl glyphs.  We had to answer different questions and the answers determined what kind of nose, cheeks, bow, buttons, etc. we would use to decorate our Gingerbread!  We love looking at these and comparing them with our friends!

We also made some Gingerbread ornaments to hang on our trees at home so we would always remember the story!
 

I bet you're hungry for some Gingerbread now!  I know we sure are!

Thanksgiving

We spent the last few weeks of November learning about the first Thanksgiving.  We were shocked at what life was like on the Mayflower!  We thought they might have eaten pretzels or marshmallows... Boy were we surprised!!

We had a Thanksgiving Feast with Mrs. Smith's class!  They were the Pilgrims and we were the Native Americans.  We presented to each other what we had learned. 

We learned about the Native American's houses, what they wore, and what the kids did for fun.  We learned about Squanto helping the Pilgrims learn to hunt and fish and grow crops.  We also learned about different Native American symbols.  We made signs of these to show Mrs. Smith's class. We worked together to sound out the words!

Now that we are done with them, we have put them into a book!

After our presentation, we had a feast!  Everyone came back to our classroom to eat!  We had made decorations for our tables and placemats for us to use while eating. 

We made costumes to wear for our presentation.  We had headbands and vests that we decorated with Native American symbols.  We also talked about Native American names.  We each picked our own Native American name for the back of our vest!

We had a great time celebrating together!  We hope you had a Happy Thanksgiving!

Our Apple Project

We have been SO busy working hard and learning that I have been horrible about taking pictures!

BUT... I have taken some!

We finished up our apple tree life cycle project and want to share it with you! 

We worked really hard learning about the life cycle of the apple tree.  We made the different seasons of the tree in the hallway.  That way all of our friends can see and learn too!

We traced our hands to make leaves for the summer tree.

We used a water bottle and paint to make the flowers of the tree for the spring season.

We used real apples that we were investigating to make apple prints for our fall tree.

We used brown paper to make the trees and worked together to write the labels.

We did some other projects including taste testing different colors of apple and graphing our results! 

But without further ado - here's the videos we made to show you what we learned!

Our introduction...

The winter apple tree...

The spring apple tree...

The summer apple tree...

The fall apple tree...

And all about our taste test and graph!

They did a great job! 

Apples Galore!

We have been learning A LOT about apples!

We have found the answers to lots of our questions in the books we have in our library.  We have learned how apple trees grow, the life cycle of apples, and what happens if you swallow a seed!  We have been most interested in the apple recipes!

Last week we decided to make applesauce!

We looked at different recipes that we found in the books we have.  We also watched some videos about how to make applesauce.  We brainstormed a list of what we needed. 

FINALLY, we were ready to actually MAKE the applesauce!

Everyone helped!  We all got pieces of apple to cut up into tiny little pieces.

Then we put our pieces into a crockpot with some water, cinnamon, and sugar.  We let it cook all day long!  It made the room smell DELICIOUS! 

The best part was tasting it!  Almost everyone wanted to try it.... and said it was GOOD!

We decided that we are very good cooks! 

Thanks to everyone who sent in apples!  This week we plan to taste test different kinds of apples and make some apple prints!  We're also trying to figure out if we can use the ovens in the kitchen to make some other apple goodies!

Exploration

This past week was filled with lots of exploration!

We found some new friends on the playground!

We were fascinated with these little creatures!  We wanted to bring them inside but decided they were better off living in their natural habitat!

We also started our first unit of exploration.  We voted on different things that we were interested in and wanted to know more about.  Most people said they wanted to learn about APPLES! 

We came up with a list of wonders... Things that we wanted to know about apples.

We came up with a great list of things we wanted to learn!



This will help us plan our apple unit.  We will use books, websites, videos and more to answer our questions. 

We can't wait to get started... we think this is going to be a tasty time!